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I am about to install 8.1.7 and patch to 8.1.7.4 on a server that already runs 8.1.6 from Oracle Financials.

I am going to create a separate 8.1.7 Oracle Home, but I plan to use the Oracle Base directory.

Because the 8.1.6 Oracle home is really important I am assuming that the install process will see that there are already listeners and oracle support processes running on the ports that are default in nature.

I guess I just was asking for any advice for laying down another Oracle_Home. I have done this in the past, but in this situation, I am really concerned about messing up the existing server.

Any suggestions will be appreciated. I have read the install guide and it seems as though everything should work fine as long as the oinstall group can see the OraInventory.loc file. What that would mean is that the installer would be intuitive enough to know not to default port settings et al after parsing that file with the Oracle Univeral Installer.

Well, if you don't want your old ORACLE_BASE being touched, you need to set your environment variables correctly so the newer version does not "see" it. One of the main items in BASE is oraInventory - that's where your OUI picks up the installed products. You will also need to modify /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc. That file has a hard coded path to where oraInventory is located, so OUI (in one sense) won't be fooled if you change your ORACLE_BASE env var - it still knows about /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc.